The present invention is related to media data processing and, particularly, to media data characterization and usage thereof.
Mobile media data players, such as MP3 players or MP4 players, are becoming more and more popular. Furthermore, due to the high data compression rates obtained by modern audio coding tools, the storage requirements for the individual audio or video files are decreasing. Concurrently, the prices for memories are decreasing as well. These memories can be chip memories or hard disks, which are used in mobile video or audio players. Since the prices for these memories drop more and more, users can store more and more different media data items on their players.
Furthermore, audio and/or video playing functionalities are not restricted to dedicated audio or video players, but are available in even more mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, navigation devices, etc. Naturally, notebook computers also have full audio/video-playing functionalities and, of course, almost unlimited storage resources due to huge hard disk resources.
In view of that, users store more and more media data items, such as audio files or video files, on their electronic data carriers, and the task for managing these increasing databases is become more and more difficult. Many mobile devices support the ID3 tag, which indicates, for an audio file, the title of the audio file, the author or a band performing the audio file, an album to which the audio file belongs to and, for example, the playing time of the audio file. These information items can be read by a mobile player, can be displayed by the mobile player and can be used for assisting the user in editing playlists, etc.
Furthermore, the MPEG-7 standard has defined the inclusion of additional metadata to audio files. These audio file metadata include additional features related to the audio content of a media data item, such as tempo, beats per minute, etc. These features can be used for characterizing a media data item in a much more content-related way and these features form a basis for finally reaching a search capability among audio files comparable to search functionalities in text files.
The specific selection of a media data item on an electronic storage device represents a very user-specific individual collection, since each user will load different media data items on her or his specific personal electronic storage device. Therefore, a collection of media data items will be a very personal issue characterizing the user of this electronic media data storage device.